Let us, in fact, celebrate (?) the fact that I am actually once again reviewing a film in my own peculiar way 🙂

This was a personal favorite of mine as a kid.

Mel Brooks made a very fine film.

It hangs together nicely.

And the trio of actresses (Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, and Cloris Leachman) who festoon this production bring a real joy of variety to the whole affair.

But the real star, besides the amazing Gene Wilder, is Marty Feldman.

Which brings us to Jimmy Savile.

Let me be clear: Marty Feldman, for all I know, was just a damned funny comedian.

But he bears a striking resemblance to the infamous Savile.

And thus we must talk about what needs talking about.

Savile was a British eccentric.

[one who gave eccentricity an extremely bad name]

His Wikipedia page lists the following as his métiers:

DJ

television personality

radio personality

dance hall manager

But he will sadly be remembered mainly as a sexual predator who preyed (it seems) primarily on those in hospitals and psychiatric institutions to which he had access as part of his celebrity and “charity fundraising”.

He may have raped children (and elderly) in as many as 28 National Health Service hospitals in the U.K.

Said Jeremy Hunt, U.K. Secretary of State for Health in 2014:

“Savile was a callous, opportunistic, wicked predator who abused and raped individuals, many of them patients and young people, who expected and had a right to expect to be safe. His actions span five decades — from the 1960s to 2010. … As a nation at that time we held Savile in our affection as a somewhat eccentric national treasure with a strong commitment to charitable causes. Today’s reports show that in reality he was a sickening and prolific sexual abuser who repeatedly exploited the trust of a nation for his own vile purposes.”

So I should just go back to reviewing Young Frankenstein, right?

Or should I wonder why John Cusack has blocked me and thousands of Trump supporters on Twitter?

Or why Kevin Spacey seems to have blocked a very large number of people on Twitter who have (at one time or another) talked about “pizzagate” or “pedogate”?

Or should we talk of Cardinal George Pell?

This week has been a bad week for Cardinal Pell 🙂

New York magazine’s article title about sums it up: “The Pope’s Pedophile?”

My friends, this young man (age 29) was apparently aroused by sexual photos of SIX-MONTH-OLD BABIES.

And I have to say it one more time: it gets worse than that.

So when you see photos of Mr. Schwartz and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, pay those photos no mind, right?

And when you find to what ends Mr. Mook and Mr. John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair) went to concoct the “Russian collusion” (or, variously, “Russian hacking”) story which the largely-liberal U.S. media swallowed whole-cloth, you might begin to wonder just what dark secrets Mr. Podesta (and Hillary Clinton, for that matter) is hiding.

“That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

A lesser film critic would rip this movie to shreds. You have to wait for it. Poor Charlie Petunia… It’s just like in life: we choose to accept or reject someone’s mannerisms and way of speaking very early on into our first meeting with them. In the cinema, sometimes it takes us a bit to adjust to a particular film’s tone. We must adjust to the budget, the philosophical slant, etc….or we walk out. If we are at home, we simply say, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m not watching this.”

To be brutally honest, the first 15 minutes of this flick don’t seem to bode well for what must follow, but what does follow is a pretty damn good film. However, it is scary.

The End.

It’s like Week-end: one senses a double meaning in the final pronouncement. End of Cinema. Thus spake Godard. His was a bold manifestation of ego (and a humble diagnosis of what was already known by the intelligentsia of France).

Why scary? Because this is the last we have heard of the inimitable Thora Birch. Her Wikipedia says she “is”… Every time I click on Jean-Luc Godard’s Wikipedia page to find that he still “is”…my world is a better place.

Why review Petunia three years after its release? To put it out in the cosmos…even if Miss Birch never reads this…to render the appreciation of which she is deserving.

Thora and her dad Jack are credited as producers. I’m not going to rake muck and give you the Kenneth-Anger-Hollywood-Babylon version of a back story. Suffice it to say that Thora’s parents are some interesting characters. I know that her dad acted as her manager. For how long, I’m not sure. People can carp about Mr. Birch’s manner of going about things, but that really defeats the purpose here. The focus should be on the artists and the work of art. This film is a masterpiece against all odds. Funny enough, the focus is not really on Thora that much (though she is in most of the film). [I believe I spotted her brother Bolt in a scene as well. He was quite good though he had only a few lines. Wikipedia mentions a brother named Kian?]

And now there is a cat meowing outside my window.

That really sums up this film. Once again, Thora’s recently starred in a film for which the director (Ash Christian) has a dead link on Wikipedia. I say dead link, but I mean stub. This is actually a step up from Winter of Frozen Dreams (for which the director had no hypertext love whatsoever). For a moment I thought this might be a pseudonym for Birch herself, but I see that Mr. Christian (why couldn’t it be sister Christian???) is an actual director from Paris, TX. Wow. That’s rich.

Well, Mr. Christian has done a formidable job with this picture.

Let’s talk characters, shall we?

Tobias Segal. His is a performance which grows from tentative beginnings to a quiet crescendo of understated brilliance.

Brittany Snow. This actress really steals the show. I was thoroughly impressed with how she turned a somewhat small part into an emotional punch in the gut.

Michael Urie. His character grew on me, but this Yaley is pretty hard to like.

David Rasche. Excellent performance. Almost like an extension of Norman-at-the-bus-stop in Ghost World, it’s as much what he doesn’t say as what he says.

Eddie Kaye Thomas. Some pretty dry acting on the front end is made up for by a nice sprint down the homestretch.

Jimmy Heck. Meh.

But you know: there’s a bit of “meh” in Thora’s performance too. As if her heart wasn’t really in this one. She still looks as beautiful as ever and her acting chops are all there. God damn it! Someone give her a great role already!!!

But you know what? The main thing is that these people are creating. They are putting it out there. Thora, Jimmy Heck, all of them. Even when Thora is less than inspired, she still puts to shame the work of most every thespian working.